Title: Orthodoxy in the Agora: Orthodox Christian Political Theologies Across History, ed. Mihai-D. Grigore and Vasilios N. Makrides
Published by: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, Germany (2024)
Language: English
ISBN: 978-3525302569
Pages: 431 

I must admit that when first asked to write this review, I wondered what more this lengthy volume could contribute to a discourse that has exploded in the past twenty years but seems exhausted, the Russian attack on Ukraine notwithstanding. Well, after reading these excellent essays covering much historical and geographical terrain in the Orthodox world, I discovered there is more to learn and discuss. This book is the most comprehensive history of political Orthodoxies and Orthodox political theologies, the two analytical categories that frame these essays and offer a remarkable coherence for such a large volume. The editors gathered a crew of international scholars whose research is impeccable and thorough and who are not afraid to offer their constructive thoughts to this ongoing and, as the book makes clear, perennial conversation.

Given the number of essays (21), a summary could not do justice to the rich content the authors unveil, nor is there any one or two that stand out over the rest since all the essays are of high quality and provide important historical details. The editors organized the book around a historical trajectory that sometimes reads like a gripping tragic drama and at other times like a tragic comedy. It begins, predictably, with Constantine’s conversion and ends with a comparison of the difference between the political theologies of the Church of Greece and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In between these essays, we learn much more about Byzantium, medieval Bulgaria and Serbia, the Danubian Principalities of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the late Ottoman Empire, modern nation-state building in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria, Moscow throughout the ages, Cyprus, Ethiopia, the Russian diaspora, the Orthodox minority churches of Finland, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia, the post-communist Georgian Orthodox Church, and, of course, post-Maidan Ukraine.

The book is mainly descriptive, providing historical details that are not well known, even to experts about the Orthodox world (I learned much from this book). The authors do enter the theoretical fray, beginning with the “Introduction,” in which the authors are clear in their attempt to avoid “the irritating tendency to reduce all politico-theological traditions of Eastern Christianity to the so-called byzantine ‘symphony’ between church and state” (18). Rather than “symphony,” the authors unfold the variety of “political Orthodoxies,” which means those various pragmatic ways in which Orthodox beliefs, practices, rituals, and institutions contributed to political maneuverings, whether they be by medieval princes, emperors or dictators, bishops, or even laypeople. One thing that the authors establish as indisputable is that politics has always found a way to entangle Orthodoxy, resulting in many kinds of political Orthodoxies throughout the centuries.

The underlying debate among the authors, even if not explicit, is over the meaning of the phrase “political theology.” There is agreement that many political theologies have existed throughout Orthodox history, which speaks to the contextualities of these political theologies, another point of consensus. Even if the authors agree on these points, they do not necessarily see explicit political theologies continually operating in the many and diverse manifestations of political Orthodoxies. Some argue that there are no political theologies operative in particular circumstances. At the same time, one author has more strongly declared that “political theology is a phenomenon of all civilizations,” a position that I share because, as this author states, “humans everywhere generate a symbolic order that somehow relates them to something supra-natural, whether in the form of spirits, ancestors, or in one form of divinity or another,” including that of the state (153). One author argued for a distinction between political theology and public theology. Still, a theology that shapes how the Church as an institution and individual Christians should act in a public arena is political insofar as it is hard to imagine a public that is not political. Even in countries where Orthodoxy is the minority, we witness Orthodox political theologies at work, whether that be in the United States or in the case of the Orthodox Finns trying to ward off post-World War II Russian influence.

No doubt, these political theologies look different depending on context. Political theologies of Orthodox in the West will differ from those institutional churches trying to regain their cultural dominance in post-communist European countries, and all these will vary from those political theologies of churches that dictatorial regimes have annexed as departments of state. This leaves us with the normative question, which these essays avoid but which is well stated by one author: “The GOC (Georgian Orthodox Church) has been building its own political theology in response to pluralisation and secularisation processes. The question remains whether it is a truly Orthodox political theology, situational politics, or an invented Kulturkampf of the post-truth era” (352, emphasis mine). Yes—context matters and it has produced different political theologies throughout history, but since theology, by definition, makes a truth claim, which political theology is Orthodox? This question is the most pressing of our time. As one author states, political theologies exist because they are “the natural outcome and at the same time the ‘locomotive engine’ of the struggle between actors with different visions of the church’s position vis-à-vis politics, culture, and society” (376). Those “different visions” result in distinct political Orthodoxies from East to West.

On the one hand, there is a political theology that mirrors most of what has existed in the history of Orthodoxy—the Church maneuvering for a privileged position in relation to “politics, culture, and society,” as in Russia, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, and, to a certain extent, Greece. On the other hand, alternative voices to the institutional rhetoric, with the help of the internet, are pushing an Orthodoxy that supports liberal democratic pluralism. Those advancing an Orthodox political theology that supports a liberal democratic state, together with all that entails for the Church’s role in relation to politics, culture, and society, are a minority and often feel like they are swimming against the tide. There is no doubt that this current form of political theology is contextual and would have been unimaginable during the Byzantine period. But is it Orthodox? That’s the theological question.

Aristotle Papanikolaou
Professor of Theology and Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, Fordham University
Co-founding Director, Orthodox Christian Studies Center